drakedevel / icfp2011 Goto Github PK

A phrenologist, an astrologist, and a eugenicist form a band. What is the band called?

 ____            _   ____       _                     
| __ )  __ _  __| | / ___|  ___(_) ___ _ __   ___ ___ 
|  _ \ / _` |/ _` | \___ \ / __| |/ _ \ '_ \ / __/ _ \
| |_) | (_| | (_| |  ___) | (__| |  __/ | | | (_|  __/
|____/ \__,_|\__,_| |____/ \___|_|\___|_| |_|\___\___|

 o Marty Rosenberg    (mjrosenb)
 o Michael Sullivan   (sully)
 o Andrew Drake       (adrake)
 o Michael Arntzenius (rntz)
 o Matthew Maurer     (maurer_)
 o Ryan Pearl         (rpearl)
 o Jacob Potter       (j4cbo)


Source diving (rebreather not included):
    - monad.sml 
        of *course* ML has monads!
        see http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/05/01/of-course-ml-has-monads/
        in particular see IO.unsafePerformIO
    - load.sml
        See magic : real -> real.
        We produce invalid moves if this is changed.
    - super.sml
        A supercolliding supercompiler.
        Please proceed quickly to the end of the structure.
        Prolonged exposure to the compiler is not a part of this competition.
    - int-map.sml
        This file does not work. Can YOU spot why? (We couldn't, so we used splay trees.)
    - terms.sml
        Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.
    - utlc-ski-compile.sml
        Slaloming down the lambda hills.
    - top.sml
        We just derived bottom all over your repository!
    - analysis.sml
        The least terrifying file in this codebase.
    - union_find.sml
        Because every project should have an algorithm that runs in inverse-ackermann.
        (Except ours doesn't. And we don't use it.)

Description of our algorithms:

The core attack algorithm is to build up a zombie attack very quickly, which
uses zombies on the opponent side to `help' their cells to death. Michael
Arntzenius spent three hours redesigning our loader to shave one cycle from our
attack sequence.

We have three separate implementations of board state search. Search.search 
breadth-first searches for the shortest path from one slot state to another.
We have an abstract expression equivalence checker (and thus minimizer). We
also can use game tree search to look ahead to find attacks.

We thought it important to be able to write more expressive code, so we built a
compiler from the untyped lambda calculus to SKI, with optimizations. This
turned out to be unnecessary, since Marty Rosenberg is an SKI whizz-kid and
provided us with "custom assembly codes".

We spent two days working on and off on a design for the toplevel loop which
would have interruptible smart jobs that would deal elegantly with disruption,
either by restarting or backups. We could not find up with a workable design and
instead handwrote a state-machine-like top-level loop.

None of our infrastructure is used heavily. Most of the code in our repository
is dead. We've wasted man-*days* of time debugging stupid mistakes, reverting
mistaken decisions, and arguing about ideas only to abandon them.

But, we have the fastest draw in the west.